TRUMP’S OWN TREASURY SECRETARY ADMITTED THE TARIFF MONEY ISN’T COMING BACK TO YOU
On February 20, the Supreme Court struck down the sweeping tariffs Trump imposed under emergency powers, ruling the administration had exceeded its authority. That should have been good news for the roughly $1,000-per-household tax increase the nonpartisan Tax Foundation says those tariffs cost Americans in 2025 alone. It isn’t. The refunds are real — they’re just not going to you.
WHO’S ACTUALLY GETTING PAID
Goldman Sachs estimates the ruling opened up a $180 billion pool of tariff revenue eligible for refunds. The first checks are already flowing — Oshkosh Corporation, a major defense and industrial manufacturer, confirmed to CNBC it started receiving payments in May, with its CFO saying the money would “help support our 2026 cash flow.” A federal judge in the U.S. Court of International Trade has since ordered customs to stop collecting the struck-down tariffs and recalculate payments already made — a decision the judge overseeing it called “a great decision for importers and consumers who paid.” One problem with that framing: consumers didn’t pay these tariffs directly. Importers — the big companies bringing goods into the country — did. That’s a legal distinction with real financial consequences, because refunds under the law go to whoever wrote the check to Customs and Border Protection, not to whoever ultimately absorbed the cost at the register.
BESSENT SAID THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD
Here’s the line that should be the headline of this entire story: speaking at the Economic Club of Dallas right after the ruling, Trump’s own Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked directly whether ordinary Americans would see any of this refund money. His answer: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see it.” That’s not an opposition talking point. That’s the administration’s own top economic official predicting, on the record, that a $180 billion pool of money collected from a tax the Supreme Court just ruled illegal will flow back to corporate importers, not to the households who actually absorbed the higher prices at checkout.
Financial analyst Stephen Kates at Bankrate confirmed the legal reality bluntly: “Consumers have no legal claim to a refund, because they weren’t the importers. They just bought the products.” He called the odds of Congress stepping in to send consumers checks “infinitesimal” — not because it’s a bad idea, but because tracing which consumer bought which tariffed good, from which importer, at what markup, across millions of transactions, is functionally impossible to administer.
AND EVEN IF PRICES GO DOWN, THEY WON’T GO DOWN FAST
Goldman Sachs’ own economists added a second layer of bad news: “We would not expect companies to lower prices in response to tariff reductions nearly as quickly as they increased them in response to tariff increases.” In other words, don’t expect grocery or retail prices to drop just because the underlying tariff got struck down — companies raised prices fast when the tax hit, and there’s no market pressure forcing them to lower prices anywhere near as fast now that it’s gone. The Federal Reserve of New York’s own data confirms 90% of the original tariff costs were passed down to U.S. companies and consumers in the first place — meaning the group that bore nearly all the pain is also the group with essentially zero legal path to getting any of it back.
THE HANDFUL OF EXCEPTIONS PROVE THE RULE
A few companies — reportedly including Costco — have said they’ll try to pass some refund money back to customers voluntarily. But per AP’s reporting, that commitment is soft and unenforceable: “executive pledges of refunds weren’t enough to prevent class action lawsuits by skeptical consumers,” who are already suing because a company’s word isn’t a legal guarantee. Meanwhile, some companies are skipping the refund fight altogether and selling their refund rights to investment firms at a discount — turning a tax struck down as illegal into a fresh financial instrument for Wall Street to trade, rather than relief for anyone who actually paid the higher prices.
THE THROUGH-LINE
A tax the Supreme Court ruled the president had no legal authority to impose. $180 billion in refunds already flowing. And the people who actually bore the cost — American families paying more at the grocery store, the hardware store, the pharmacy — legally entitled to none of it, a fact the administration’s own Treasury Secretary predicted publicly before a single refund check went out. This isn’t a bureaucratic accident. It’s how the law is structured, and nobody in this administration has proposed fixing it.